Sustainability Technology & The Evolution of Smart Cities

Electricity generation from tissue paper

Sustainability Problem: Tissue paper and toilet paper account for a high proportion of solid waste from cities and contribute to deforestation.

Technology:

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands have comeup with the electricity from toilet paper project. They found that they could generate energy from waste toilet paper with about the same efficiency as a natural gas plant and for the same cost as in-home solar panels.

Used toilet paper from wastewater-treatment plants is collected, then dried out and converted it into a gas in a chamber that can reach up to 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit (900 degrees Celsius). They removed tars, ashes and moisture from the gas to leave behind mostly methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Those gases were fed into solid-side fuel cells, which maintain very high temperatures to generate low-emission (1/6th the carbon emissions of a coal plant) electricity from methane.

Implementation:

Waste toilet paper, is a continually available resource. In the international peer-reviewed journal Energy Technology, the researchers present the basic system design, as well as its electricity yield and overall efficiency, based on detailed mass and energy balance calculations. We might see the first Waste Tissue Paper-to-electricity plant being built in China.